Custom printed USB flash drives for schwag/sale

[Matt McKenzie]

Hello,

NA Ambassador here, just finished with OReilly OSCON last week, had a great
turnout (from what I saw anyway).

I spoke a bit with Jack Aboutboul during the OSCON about revisiting the
topic of custom printed USB flash drives for schwag, and also possibly to
offer for sale.
He said that it has been tried before (I noticed later he has one), but it
turned out to be somewhat expensive, and the drives were too small to be
useful for our purposes, such as only 256M or 512M (bootable livecd based
Fedora system needs 700M at least).  Now USB drives are getting bigger and
cheaper for the size, so a 1GB or 2GB drive should be more reasonable price
I would think.

I have done a little preliminary scouting, but since I don't know what kind
of quantities we want I can't really get quotes, and Jack didn't mention
what company was used before.

He said to bring the topic up on the mailing list for discussion, so here I
am, and here it is.

It looks like there is a NA meeting tonight, I'll do my best to make it and
bring it up there too.

[David Nalley]

Hi Matt!

I think RH had a number printed up for the last RH summit or FUDCon.
That being said - it looks like we'd be talking 10-12 dollars for a
1GB USB drive replete with logo based on my 5 minutes with Google if
we ordered several hundred.
But please attend the meeting and bring this up.

Thanks,

David Nalley

2008/7/29 Matt McKenzie :
> Hello,
>
> NA Ambassador here, just finished with OReilly OSCON last week, had a great
> turnout (from what I saw anyway).
>
> I spoke a bit with Jack Aboutboul during the OSCON about revisiting the
> topic of custom printed USB flash drives for schwag, and also possibly to
> offer for sale.
> He said that it has been tried before (I noticed later he has one), but it
> turned out to be somewhat expensive, and the drives were too small to be
> useful for our purposes, such as only 256M or 512M (bootable livecd based
> Fedora system needs 700M at least).  Now USB drives are getting bigger and
> cheaper for the size, so a 1GB or 2GB drive should be more reasonable price
> I would think.
>
> I have done a little preliminary scouting, but since I don't know what kind
> of quantities we want I can't really get quotes, and Jack didn't mention
> what company was used before.
>
> He said to bring the topic up on the mailing list for discussion, so here I
> am, and here it is.
>
> It looks like there is a NA meeting tonight, I'll do my best to make it and
> bring it up there too.
> --
>
> Matt M.
> LinuxKnight
>
> --
> Fedora-ambassadors-list mailing list
> [e-mail]
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-ambassadors-list

[Karlie Robinson]

Why not just do stickers? 
Print up a bunch of, version independent ones and use them whenever you 
want.

Something like http://www.dometag.com/

Then if you really want to get fancy, a Kingston Data traveler is 
designed to accept a customizing label.  In fact when you buy one, the 
side with the metal label hardly stays in it's little recess.  It's 
suppose to come out.

~Karlie

David Nalley wrote:
> Hi Matt!
>
> I think RH had a number printed up for the last RH summit or FUDCon.
> That being said - it looks like we'd be talking 10-12 dollars for a
> 1GB USB drive replete with logo based on my 5 minutes with Google if
> we ordered several hundred.
> But please attend the meeting and bring this up.
>
> Thanks,
>
> David Nalley
>
> 2008/7/29 Matt McKenzie :
> > Hello,
> >
> > NA Ambassador here, just finished with OReilly OSCON last week, had a great
> > turnout (from what I saw anyway).
> >
> > I spoke a bit with Jack Aboutboul during the OSCON about revisiting the
> > topic of custom printed USB flash drives for schwag, and also possibly to
> > offer for sale.
> > He said that it has been tried before (I noticed later he has one), but it
> > turned out to be somewhat expensive, and the drives were too small to be
> > useful for our purposes, such as only 256M or 512M (bootable livecd based
> > Fedora system needs 700M at least).  Now USB drives are getting bigger and
> > cheaper for the size, so a 1GB or 2GB drive should be more reasonable price
> > I would think.
> >
> > I have done a little preliminary scouting, but since I don't know what kind
> > of quantities we want I can't really get quotes, and Jack didn't mention
> > what company was used before.
> >
> > He said to bring the topic up on the mailing list for discussion, so here I
> > am, and here it is.
> >
> > It looks like there is a NA meeting tonight, I'll do my best to make it and
> > bring it up there too.
> > --
> >
> > Matt M.
> > LinuxKnight
> >
> > --
> > Fedora-ambassadors-list mailing list
> > [e-mail]
> > https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-ambassadors-list
>
> --
> Fedora-ambassadors-list mailing list
> [e-mail]
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-ambassadors-list

[Paul W. Frields]

On Tue, 2008-07-29 at 17:15 -0400, David Nalley wrote:
> Hi Matt!
>
> I think RH had a number printed up for the last RH summit or FUDCon.
> That being said - it looks like we'd be talking 10-12 dollars for a
> 1GB USB drive replete with logo based on my 5 minutes with Google if
> we ordered several hundred.
> But please attend the meeting and bring this up.

That figure agrees with what I saw when I did some market research
before.  So weigh 10-12 dollars vs. 1.60-2.50 for a Live CD and you can
see that the production cost really only makes sense if you sustain the
stock through selling these rather than giving them away.  (Red Hat
printed up the ones at the Summit, Fedora didn't pay for them -- if we
had, we would have wanted them to be blue!)

This might make sense from a Fedora Store perspective, if stock could be
returned for resale should the event not deplete the entire stock.
There's also the matter of trademark licensing to consider, but that
could probably be worked out I think.